Opinion

Anita Robinson: Table manners are disappearing along with home-cooked meals

Anita Robinson
Anita Robinson Anita Robinson

Where do you stand on that forbidden sausage roll recently confiscated from a primary school pupil’s lunchbox?

Healthy eating policies introduced in schools arguably contribute to growing public awareness of the damage junk foods do to our children. Unfortunately, some parents are carelessly unsupportive – and it’s in the nature of the young to subvert authority.

The first whistleblowers on the snack industry were regarded as tiresome health freaks. The small percentage of parents who initially supported their wholesome eating philosophy by supplying nourishing lunches were rarely aware of what became of them. My classroom bin overflowed daily with half-eaten bananas and apples with one bite out of them – and that was only the top layer.

Beneath the ruined fruit were the nutritious sandwiches, lovingly made by maternal hands, still in their wrappings and dumped uneaten in favour of their friends’ chocolate bars and fat-saturated crisps. Monster Munch was everyone’s favourite. The eye-watering pungency of the aroma as the packet was opened and the shrivelling of the tongue on first contact, made it a winner, hands down.

Providing a child with a healthy lunch was no guarantee he’d eat it. The healthiest thing about a packed lunch was the thriving swap-shop between classmates as nourishing protein was bartered for empty carbohydrates and sugars, on the well-known principle that everybody else’s stuff always tastes better than your own.

Take a school party on a day trip and their food choices reveal a great deal about attitudes to food at home. The same pupils with money in their pockets are regular visitors to the corner shop en route to their school’s ‘breakfast club’ – and they’re not buying edamame beans.

What percentage of them eat real food, prepared and cooked from scratch with fresh ingredients? Around 43 per cent. Convenience foods rule – and that’s not okay.

More regrettable still is the fact that the pattern of family eating has changed forever. To sit down together at a table, properly laid, is an experience that may occur once a year at Christmas. Today’s children are missing out on a tremendously important socialising phase. Many of them don’t know how to sit on a chair or handle cutlery properly. The table is the place where we learn to listen, express views and interact with others. It’s where we learn the virtues of courtesy, patience and the art of conversation.

Regrettably, ‘table manners’ have largely disappeared, but it’s how we behave at table that differentiates us from pigs at a trough. This I frequently feel like pointing out to parents who inflict their socially untutored children on the public in hotels and restaurants.

But I digress. Healthy eating is simple in concept but fiendishly difficult to implement. Firstly, all the things you adore have skull-and-crossbones stickers on them, indicating ‘this will kill you in the long run’. Secondly, it’s extraordinarily hard to resist the impulse to buy little treats `just to have in the house.' You and I dear reader, know these are the staples of the ‘eleven o’clock rootle’ – a feverish late-night hunt through cupboards and tins for something nice before bedtime, a modern manifestation of the old Horlicks notion of ‘night starvation’. What a brilliant marketing ploy that was, to suggest we might all die of malnutrition in our sleep! A phlegmatic few of us feel it’s worth it to dig our graves with our own teeth, possibly because we were brought up in a time of economic stringency with little money and less choice.

Sadly, we of the old guard can no more stem the tide of informal eating than hold back the sea with tablecloths and doilies, but it would be pleasant if the rising generation were taught how to cope with two knives and a napkin when they encounter them and subscribe to a degree of grace at the table – or at least to remove the takeaway pizza from its box and put it on a plate before eating it.

I see that dainty doyenne of all things domestic, the Blessed Mary Berry is dispensing with a dining-room in her new house.

Surely the apocalypse is nigh….